I went to Havana with a diverse group of business people, financial professionals and representatives from the US Fed.

Here is a photo taken with some of the classic cars that proudly dominate the roads despite cheaper Russian and Chinese alternatives.

The city was beautiful … dirty and broken, for sure … but still beautiful. Here is a view from my hotel room.

I commented that it was almost like seeing a severely wounded elephant. You can tell that it's hurt (and barely a shadow of its old self). Nevertheless, you can see the amazing bone structure. It is easy to imagine what it once was.

In Cuba, the geography and the architecture are amazing. However, money hasn't been spent on the upkeep. Even though people live there, it seems surreal (almost like a post-apocalyptic wasteland).

In the story of Exodus, the Jews spent 40 years wandering the desert after escaping from Egypt. That means two generations of people, who didn't remember life as slaves, were ultimately the ones who entered the “Promised Land”.

On some level, that's how Cuba is now. Most inhabitants weren’t born (or can’t remember) the 1960s. They have known nothing but this.

Cuba is an interesting place … and I’d bet that it has an interesting future.

The “lack” had a side effect. It produced a mutation. A portion of society grew more resourceful and resilient.

Like natural selection … nature finds a way.

The rules change, the players change, even the game itself changes ... That is how new ideas and new leaders emerge.

With that said, the next chart surprised me. It shows the number of years it took for various products to gain 50 million users.

Pornhub tracks data like its business depends on it. Well, it is the number one site for pornography. What does that mean? In 2018, over 5,517,700,000 hours of porn was watched on their site. That’s approximately 6,298 centuries of video.

Moreover, last year, it got 33.5 BILLION visits. That’s 1,064 people a second, or 92 million a day. To put that in perspective, that's more people than live in the entire country of Germany.

Here are some additional factoids about its use.

4403 Petabytes of data transferred (574 MB of data for every person on earth)

Consumed more bandwidth than the entire internet in 2002

Stormy Daniels was the number 1 "trend" search in 2018 (followed by Fortnite ...)

January 06, 2019

AI first broke onto the film scene with Metropolis in 1927. "Maria" the evil robot disguising herself as a human played on many human fears; deception, lack of control, and perhaps most importantly being replaced.

Maria represented a future that was bleak and set the foundation for AI in cinema. Since then, there have been approximately 100 movies starring AI.

According to Enlighten Digital, 52% of movies portray AI positively, which means it's about 50/50, and there has been a 144% increase in AI movies since 2010 - so we're becoming more saturated with AI.

According to a study by Cambridge, seeing more films portraying robots (whether positive or negative) is associated with more positive attitudes toward robots. This is in line with the theory that the more exposure one has with "out-group" members (i.e. robots, or people of other races) the more positive one's attitude toward them.

These movies all have different tones but there's a trope that remains common from that initial film in 1927 to films in 2018.

We're always imagining that next step. What's going to happen as AI becomes (in some ways) smarter than us? What's going to happen when our creations surpass our control? What's going to happen if the line between human and robot blurs?

There are a lot of advancements in real-life, in respect to AI. As such, there is a lot of movement on AI ethics, and how to best limit or best enable AI.

In film, we gravitate toward two extremes - utopias and dystopias. In real life, we can recognize those extremes are unlikely ... but the effect of AI is still profound.

We're expanding a technology with the ability to radically change our world - for better or worse - so it's important to keep a purpose-driven approach. We can't lose track of humanity in the pursuit of AI.

Metropolis's final title card (that first AI movie from 1927) still rings true ... "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart"

This is a pretty cool idea, or at least I thought so. My youngest son said "I don't particularly understand IKEA directions or algorithms so this is basically the worst of both worlds for me." Finally, we agree about something.